skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that always amazes me about the U.S.'s defense spending is how little they seem to be able to buy with it.

Yes, they have all sorts of cool gadgets, but the U.S. military can't even establish order in a primitive backwater like Afghanistan, and that's with help from a dozen other nations! The "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq (a.k.a. terror bombing, as it would have been called in WWII) was a tremendous display of military might, but what did it accomplish besides ensuring that there would be lots of rebuilding work for contractors and royally pissing off the populace? Any hope for U.S. forces to be greeted as liberators went up in Tritonal-fueled fire with that campaign. Old-fashioned boots on the ground with constant close contact with civilians might have helped with damage-control, but that's not the U.S. military's way. The U.S. military's way is to bunker down and send out choppers and mechanized patrols that shoot up anything that looks remotely suspicious, only to be blown to bits by an IED the locals would have told soldiers about if they had walked through instead. Iraq is still in the grasp of terrorism (5 killed today: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8545451) and is more anti-American than ever.

The latest technology to be abused is drones. They're deadly. They're sexy. They're completely safe (for Americans)! It must seem like a coup to military brass to be able to blow terrorists into a hot mess of crispy giblets without sending a single human being within a hundred kilometers of the target. Meanwhile, civilians are killed, sovereignty of allies is violated, and enough anti-American sentiment is sown to more than make up for the deaths of a few terrorists in the long run. Then some American pundit asks, "Why do they hate us?".

This is just the latest chapter in the U.S. military's long obsession with technology. The Vietnam war didn't turn out the way the U.S. wanted for a host of reasons. Just one was that the military thought they could control territory by flying from hotspot to hotspot without bothering with permanent forces on the ground. A site would be labelled as a hotbed of enemy activity so the military would fly in several choppers full of troops and airlift in some artillery. Those forces would typically not stray from the safe radius of artillery coverage, so all the NVA had to do was get outside that radius if they didn't want to engage. The U.S.'s obsession with technology functionally handed complete initiative to their enemy.

The U.S. military needs to stop viewing wars as a proving ground for the latest high-tech killing devices and start focusing on results. Put the toys away and focus on what works. Get out of the humvees and apaches and walk through those contested regions, talking to people. Yes, some will get sniped, but this is the only way to establish order, and that will save more lives in the long run. Instead of spending billions on drones to kill terrorists in Pakistan, spend a few millions to make Pakistan want to hunt them down themselves. In short, stop trying to solve everything with new hardware and use some brains!
Hmm. If you're just talking about the extra growth, then that's not even external. I don't think it's a good example.
Clipboard goes beyond web clips
> Money quote: "That’s like buying a car based on how much it weighs. It’s irrelevant."

Car manufacturers are constantly going on about how the latest model weighs X% less than last years. Lower weight usually means better handling and a more fun driving experience...
Yes, but by the same token the original poster seemed to imply that there was nothing more to working than coding. Whether you're founding a start-up or working as a developer for some giant multi-national, I hope there's more to your job descriptions than typing code and check-ins (and hence a more balanced experience).

With that said, that is all some people have. And for those people, the OP is probably right and they will probably not be happy for long.
> Developers have very little positive to go off of

I don't know that I agree. Red, Green, Refactor. That continuous moment of hitting green. Every time you solve that problem. Every time you strike a bug off the list. There are so many measurable accomplishments programmers make.
Political == social. Social despair occurs primarily because of politics. Hell, in the world of humanity, everything is political/social.
You can have all those things without religion.
SkyDrive vs Google Drive
I've often wondered why no one has made a true competitor to Visual Basic (and VB.NET). This is a true rapid-development language; all of the UI code is written for you based on the drag and drop. Everything is straightforward, and many things can be tweaked just using the UI designer interface. The language is powerful (it's C# with a different syntax) yet incredibly simple.

Better yet, I've often wondered why no one has made something better than VB.NET; why no one has made a Visual Basic that, instead of compiling to the CLR, compiled to Ruby or Javascript or some other common web language. This would leapfrog Visual Basic in so many ways. Some have tried, including Microsoft, but it's just not the same.

From the Tech Crunch description, this might be it (though I remain cautiously optimistic). I'm looking forward to what they can do with it, and better yet, what I can do with it.
Federal Circuit reexamining whether software is patentable
Thanks for your comments! The idea of the conversation interface is that the user is driving the conversation. We wanted to make it extremely simple for the other person to see and respond. We don't have a good solution for the flip-side yet. It's one of the issues we found with certain translation applications that have user interfaces meant for two people. One person is probably not going to know how to use it.

I definitely do see value in this kind of interaction though, but we're going to have to be careful about how we implement it so we don't make the interface confusing for the person you actually want to communicate and not confuse!
Personally, I can say using a stand-up desk has been a game changer for me. No longer do I suffer with neck and back pain.

Extended sitting has become a serious issue in today's workforce and there are plenty of options out there to get the job done.

My stand-up desk (UpDesk)is height-adjustable, which allows for better movement and customization. Finding the perfect mixture of standing AND sitting is key. Remember, anything in excess can be harmful.

Overall, standing up while working is extremely beneficial. I've noticed it has helped my focus, productivity, and energy level. Not to mention it has the ability to add years to my life.
Zero point energy scam up on Kickstarter
Block Bad Requests to your Server with Bad Behavior
I'm taking this course, and have no idea what the motivation for the cheaters was. But, it would be nice to have some sort of forum where you could discuss your answers after you had successfully completed the homework. I know my code is correct, but I think I would learn even more by seeing other people's solutions. Something like the forums on the Project Euler site would be fantastic.
Hey ernesth. I can understand where you're coming from with the concern about the culture of books, speaking as a novel writer.

Speaking from that side of the keyboard, though, and as a hobbyist game developer, I see the exact same cultural experience with games.

When I witness people building their own Mass Effect Shepherd armor (or, heck, my own cosplay) standing alongside Harry Potter costumes at DragonCon, the dividing line disappears for me.

I would love to see this new bundle follow the same product rules that provided crazy exposure and crazy sales* for game developers.
Shameless plug: and also https://github.com/ubercomp/jslm32/ (includes a mechanism that generates Javascript on the fly).
Free Cup Black Coffee Vector
Hack PR by First Round Capital
> Artists, writers, musicians, engineers, carpenters

You should draw a clear line between those professions. All of them are "producing" professions, but the first group (artists, writers, musicians) do not have to maintain the technical responsibility that the latter (engineers, carpenters, programmers) has to.

This _technical responsibility_ brings a lot of the "negative" said on the article; actually, that's not "negative" it is "not good enough".
> these 'new' Bitbucket features are a blatant clone of Github as well

I think you misplaced the word "some". Inline pull-request comments are ripped off gh, but I've never seen arbitrary commit diffs there, it certainly isn't in the UI. The branch selector yes, the overview not at all. The UI organization has also, if anything, moved further away from Github's.
Future tip: there's a fair amount of price transparency out there, if you search for invoice pricing. Sites like Edmunds provide invoice pricing for the entire car, as well as the MSRP.

Most high volume dealers will sell you cars at or 1% above invoice. This way you can walk in to the dealer informed and know the approximate range.

Dealers don't like this. Some only negotiate as "$ or % off MSRP" and absolutely refuse to compare to invoice. It doesn't matter, since you know what the invoice is.

Finally, demanding not to pay for an accessory that's on the car that you don't care about is a losing proposition. Most of these accessories are factory- or port-installed and are factored in the sticker printout that's with the car. The dealer was charged by the manufacturer for that accessory and has to pay its cost. You are better off finding another car with less stuff on it, or ordering a car (which usually is a painful process, unless you're buying a Mini).
Show HN: Redesigned Openera.com - your automated email assistant.
This thread is pretty cold by now but I wanted to thank you for the link to Ignition — it's a really neat window into some of the chemistry and practice of 20th century rocketry. Reminded me of Max Gergel's "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide?" http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/gergel_isopr... which, now that I look at the link, is hosted at the same server.
> And that idea itself is a cultural thing. Most Americans (even liberals) would literally barf at the idea of having "a law for the unique price of books" as being European-style socialism.

And there's another meta-cultural observation: European-style liberals barf at that idea, too.
I'm really pleased to see that Mozilla is finally stepping up to the plate and trying to bring web developers back into the fold that have been enjoying the much better Webkit dev tools. I hope they continue with this momentum.
One of the primary reasons I switched to Chrome was due to the awesome syncing abilities with Android Chrome.

Does anyone know if Firefox Mobile has matured to a point where it doesn't lag incredibly due to the huge memory footprint on Android?
Does anyone have any real world examples of Trigger.io apps? How's it compare to other services like PhoneGap?

I will be working on an iOS app shortly and am curious about Trigger.io. Parse looks like something I would definitely be able to use, but Trigger.io and the like make me uneasy. I don't want a crappy user experience.

So, has anyone created an app with Trigger that can be compared to or is indistinguishable from a native application (i.e. not HTML wrapped in a UIWebView)?
Bing's Satellite Images of the CIA's Secret Bin Laden Training Facility
I'm working on a serialized novel "bundle" of my own, one that mixes multiple media with each monthly module.
Yes. I did not take Bryan to task on that, but it really gives V8 a bit too much credit for it to cause Andreas Gal to work on trace-JIT before 2006 (on Java, for his UCI PhD; then on JS in collaboration with Adobe and Mozilla).

Tracing was a good rocket to strap on SpiderMonkey-the-2008-era-interpreter but it fell to a combination of the PIC-based approach V8 championed and Brian Hackett's Type Inference work (PLDI 2012, http://rfrn.org/~shu/drafts/ti.pdf).
Twitter Buys Vine, a Video Clip Company That Never Launched
Google Brings More Than 100 Virtual Keyboards, Transliterations To Gmail
How I unlearned my MBA
I listend to David Heinemeier Hansson's podcast dating back to 2010. A lot of his messages about learning to build an create unique stuff of value really resonates with me. I'm a devbootcamp grad and this is a post I wrote about my thoughts on the topics.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012 - not who you think
I have a bookmarklet script that removes any "target" attributes on anchors, but it may be harder to circumvent "new window" URLs if they're initiated via scripting.
The crown jewels should always be kept under lock and key!

A couple of years ago I was at one of the Github drink meetups. I asked if they were working on encrypted private repos (this was just before or around the time Github Firewall was introduced). A Github employee told me no… before adding that in his opinion source code was not valuable.

I asked him to clarify and he said imagine if Twitter had their source code leaked. It wouldn't be a big issue as Twitters success was built more on business execution rather than code. A valid point perhaps but small indie developers could easily be put out of business if the source code to their unique selling point or competitive advantage were to be made public.

I'm sure Github (and others) take security seriously, but given the above, caveat emptor!
It's very sad that these convicted criminials could have committed much more hurtful crimes for their 3rd offense and received the same penalty: life in prison.

I don't feel sympathy for those people who are twice convicted of felonies and get caught again.
I wonder if also using a sandboxed localstorage as a memcached would be useful? I guess you would have to account for bandwidth, response time, and available memory. Also account for variable CPU usage, but I wonder if you could train an algorithm to account for these factors. I could see it being a great way to "get paid for using X Extension".
The original article was about error rate, that's what I was talking about:

1. write some code
2. run the code
3. get an error message
4. find the error and back to step 1

Hour by hour, day after day, I do this. Always searching
for what's wrong with what I'm creating, rarely thinking
about what's good about it. It's a negative reinforcement
feedback loop.

If the error rate was lower, steps 3 and 4 would happen less frequently.
And Jackie Chan did all this plus acting, choreography, and stuntwork. He famously had an editing setup in his hotel room and would edit the footage himself after each day's shooting.
Perhaps Mac users are wealthier than the average Windows user? I am not so sure about the Linux differential. It would be interesting to see the differences conditional on income.
Wow.. ok, now i bought it but i didn't think it would be so much trouble reading the books on my iPad.. itunes? syncing? Bahh, i don't even know when i last used itunes :(

boots into windows to update some crappy buggy software to read an ebook on his tablet
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking
I think this skill is something all hackers should learn, as they implicitly use it in most of their ventures. Once mathematical thinking (abstract/outside the box thinking) is learned, it will be far easier to learn new math techniques and concepts in the future.
It would be cool if they could offer "kindle keys" just like they do with steam keys.
The issue isn't that the school isn't within their rights to do this. It's that they're putting an unnecessary limitation on good students, forcing them to help fight the cheaters. There's nothing inherently wrong with putting up my answers to homework on GH. The onus should be on students to not cheat; it feels kind of scummy to force students who have no desire to cheat to take down their code in a sad attempt to fight cheaters.
A New Data Toy -- Unboxing the Raspberry Pi
My theory is that Linux is used by experts, usually people with high-paying programming jobs, who can afford to drop a little more money. Macs are more expensive, so they'll also belong to people with higher income. Windows machines are cheap, so they're bought by everyone else, and (on average) they can't afford to drop as much money on the various bundles.

Also, since Windows machines are cheaper, they're more likely to be bought by cheapskates.
Why not open the ePub links from Safari and say "Open With..." iBooks? Worked fine for me. They will sync over to iTunes and your computer or the cloud when you next sync up.
Except Singapore rigs its elections.
GitHub's loss leader is providing ad-free hosting for millions lines of open source software. That's not only a good business decision, but one that benefits everyone. I happily pay $12/month for GitHub because nearly all the open-source projects I develop with are on there and I don't want to bother operating two accounts.
Can you just email yourself the ebook and open it that way?
Rethinking Site Registration Strategies: Traditional Email vs 3rd Party Services
It's a different way to price products - they charge per user. So, if your little startup starts growing, they bring in a bit of cash and have opportunities to up-sell with the other products in their line.
5 orders of magnitude will result in $1million/month.
>but complacency in not addressing the problems' causes

To be fair, people have been using alcohol as a convenient bandage for their social anxiety for a very long time now. This problem is not limited to this context - it's literally all around us. I would argue that denial is one of the hallmarks of humanity, not merely a glitch.
This is one of those cases where I wish we could all walk a mile in each other's shoes.

I can program. I am not "a" programmer. I've written a Ruby Gem or two, and I've even had some (very) small contributions accepted to widely used gems. I am really a project manager, but I recongize the value of understanding the tools that are used to build the projects I oversee.

I can sell. I am not "a" salesman. I'm a good listener. I'm able to establish positive relationships relatively quickly. After meetings, I receive positive feedback from customers We're a small company, so I often end up sitting in on sales meetings. I find it's valuable to have a first-hand view in what customer objections are.

I've walked a mile in both sets of shoes. I can tell you, unquestionably, that both careers can be equally frustrating. It's easy to center your world view around your own challenges, but to believe that yours are unique and more important than others crosses the line to narcissism.

Sales people have it plenty rough. Not only are they constantly hammered by objections from customers, but any time they take those items back to the development team, they're met with similar apprehension about adding to the backlog.

> But I don't think it's healthy or a good idea to ignore the problems we face because some people sometimes in some particular way have things even worse.

Who suggested that we ignore the problems? The important part about recognizing someone else's challenges is that we should seek to support each other in both directions.
(Backblaze engineer here.) We have been told that until we buy blocks of 10,000 drives, we cannot deal directly with the drive manufacturers. We're not there yet, thus we NORMALLY bid out each drive purchase (about one large order per month) to four or five regular "resellers" and "distributors" like CDW, Ingram, B&H, etc and take the best price that month. We were down at $90 or so for individual Hitachi 3 TBytes at the low point before the crisis. We're currently paying around $160 from CDW and friends and we can afford that without raising our prices. During the Thailand flood crisis, CDW offered "not enough drives" (half our order) for $350 per drive. We said "no", because we couldn't afford "yes". :-)

Anybody can win our business by under bidding the other resellers, and we're ALWAYS open to suggestions. If you know any way to achieve lower drive prices, let us know! PLEASE!!
Ah yes, Hacker News... the go-to place for all your news on religion.
Oh ok, sounds better, so i can use the links on the ipad and skip itunes? Then ignore my comment, i'm happy again ;)
RIM: No BB10 Debut Until March
I think this is one area where dashboards can help. Chart the metrics that are important to your organization, and prominently display them.

Chart the number of users on your site throughout the day. The number of times they do X or Y, that your app enabled them to do. Put a big counter on the wall for sales/new users/etc. Make a big deal when milestones are reached.

Bug trackers, user complaints, etc can definitely weigh us down. But hopefully there's some encouragement in the data that we're doing some things really right.
Thought-controlled 'Pong' Game Created by Hack Manhattan
Two divorces in 2.5 years. And since divorces arent "same day service" type things I'm pretty sure the dude is "unhappy" with his private life.
Privacyfix Shows Who's Tracking You on the Web, Gives You the Tools to Stop It
Once I heard from an architect(in the original, designer of buildings sense of the word), that he wished he would get as instantaneous feedback of his work, as a developer can from a compiler.
I stopped at: Hand your $600 phone to a stranger.

Although, they could sell a tether as an accessory.
Work with say Khronos group to establish an OpenCPU standard with a source code and possibly intermediate representation.

Socialize amongst CPU vendors, and interest platform makers in the mobile and desktop space.

Watch it absorbed by web standards.
> To start with, it probably offers a sense of community.

With all respect, the religious aspect of a human community is a coincidence -- on can have a community without the religious context. I personally think it's an unfortunate accident of history that so many human communities are built on a scaffolding of religion.

> It can also help bridge gaps between different parts of our society.

It is here that you touch an important point, indeed a critical one. History shows us that, overall, religion creates gaps, it doesn't mend them. For each religious endeavor to reach across a chasm between people, there are ten religious endeavors to create the chasm in the first place.
Favorite feature of the dev toolbar: it has a "screenshot" command to dump a PNG of either the entire page or a specific block.
This article might have been about something interesting. I don't know, because I stopped after this:

"It was less a surprise to the extent that he, famously demanding and meticulous, had a specific vision which needed to be realized, but more-so a surprise I had never thought of him to do such a peculiar thing."

I don't continue reading after it becomes clear that I'm looking at some kind of rough first draft. If you want it to appear that you have some respect for yourself and your potential readers, at least look over your output once quickly before sticking it on the end of a publicly-facing URL. You have some room. Try to be more articulate than a tweet.
On the first humble bundle, the speculation was that Linux users are happy to pay a little extra for something they normally do not have access to. Game developers often do not target Linux, so a bundle of indie games with explicit Linux support was fairly novel. Many who commented said they wanted to show the market potential for Linux support, and by keeping the platform average higher than other, more supported platforms, they would achieve this goal.

I don't have any hard evidence on the success of that, nor do I necessarily feel it is relevant to expand this out to an ebook or music bundle, but the information is there as presented.
I'm sure you guys keep track of read/write statistics as well; have you thought about spinning drives down on full BB pods until a restore is requested (similar to how Amazon Glacier's storage system works)?
Node.js modules and apps that work with C++ libraries/services that return 64bit numbers. Not having 64bit integers is an issue.